50% off Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Third Edition (10-Volumes)

This discipline-defining encyclopedia serves research needs in numerous fields that are affected by the rapid pace
and substantial impact of technological change and is a must have for every academic library collection.
Expires 12/31/2016.

Abstract

Ontologies now play an important role in providing a commonly agreed understanding of a domain and in developing knowledge-based systems. They intend to capture the intrinsic conceptual and semantic structure of a specific domain. Many methodologies, tools and languages are already available to help anthologies’ designers and users. However, a number of questions remain open: what ontology development methodology provides the best guidance to model a given problem, what steps to be performed in order to develop an ontology? which techniques are appropriate for each step? how ontology’ lifecycle steps are upheld by the software tools? how to maintain an ontology and to evolve it in a consistent way? how to adapt an ontology to a given context? To provide answers to these questions, the authors review in this chapter the main methodologies, tools and languages for building, updating and representing ontologies that have been reported in literature.

From Information Systems Design To Ontology Modeling

Conceptual modeling is one of the most important tasks in the development of information systems in terms of both organizational understanding and systems development. It requires a determination of the domain entities and their relationships as well as different static and dynamic views of the expected system. The domain entities are not always simple nor organized since we must consider, when modeling, all the field’s concepts belonging to the universe of discourse as well as their pertinent relationships.

The result of a design step is usually expressed using a model (Sánchez et al., 2005). This model may contain some ambiguities and errors due to the incomprehension of the domain of study and the difficulty to determine its concepts and relationships.